Hometown Bounty
[img_assist|nid=474|title=Paul Dutton|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=180|height=250]Around 9 a.m. on an early November morning, a crew of workers is busy assembling holiday wreaths at Dutton’s Farm Stand in Newfane. Business has been busy over the weekend, and it’s time to replenish the supply. The crew has already been working for some time, pinning, twisting and weaving a large pile of balsam branches into hoops, which in turn are stacked on a truck to be sent out to the other stores. It’s chilly, and everyone is dressed in layers of work wear, including hats and gloves. The sky is winter grey with no sign of sun in sight, and although the foliage still clings to the trees, there is a telltale essence of snow in the air.Suddenly Paul Dutton, the owner and founder of the business, appears. Dressed in a one-piece insulated work suit and work boots, I can tell he’s been up for hours and is hitting his midmorning stride. His eyes dart around the room, looking for details that need attention. "Clean out the ashes first," he says to a woman bringing in wood to fill the furnace. "I gotta finish up some loose ends and then I’ll be ready to talk," he tells me as he takes a phone call from a Christmas tree distributor. "Have an apple while you’re waiting." I happily grab a Courtland and walk around the room, enjoying its crisp, fresh taste. It’s an excellent breakfast, and fitting for my visit to Dutton’s-after all, I came to talk about cider. But I soon came to find that behind all the colorfully labeled bins of fruits and vegetables, that Dutton’s is quite the full-scale commercial farming operation.
Raised in Windham by dairy farmers, Paul Dutton studied agriculture at the University of Vermont and worked in Michigan nurseries propagating berries after graduating. He admits, though, that he was a self-proclaimed "sheltered farm boy," (although he smiles when he says it "didn’t hurt him a bit,") and eventually got homesick. He came back to Vermont to start his own business and in 1982, he and his future wife Wendy purchased some acreage in Brookline that today encompasses a large portion of Dutton’s commercial farmland. He is adamant about how he built his business, literally, from the ground up.
"I did that all by my lonesome," he said of buying that first piece of land. "No hand-me-downs. One step at a time. Since then I’ve never sold a piece of land in my life-just bought."
By Betsy Parks
Photography by Hubert Schriebl
